I've been a fan of Japanese popular music for 40 years, and have managed to collect a lot of material during that time. So I decided I wanted to talk about Showa Era music with like-minded fans. My particular era is the 70s and 80s (thus the "kayo kyoku"). The plus part includes a number of songs and artists from the last 30 years and also the early kayo. So, let's talk about New Music, aidoru, City Pop and enka.
Credits
I would like to give credit where credit is due. Videos are from YouTube and other sources such as NicoNico while Oricon rankings and other information are translated from the Japanese Wikipedia unless noted.
Been a while since I posted anything in here. In fact, I have dedicated most of this year to my master's thesis, which is coming to an end very soon. In the meantime, I managed to watch some anime series. My motivation for watching anime had been dormant for about a year until I rewatched Sailor Moon last year. I definitely don't pick up as many series as I did back in the day (I used to follow a lot of seasonal shows), but it's still as enjoyable.
I would like to talk about some songs that marked this year for me in terms of anime. They haven't necessarily come out this year, but they're from series I watched in 2021.
Masami Okui - Rondo-revolution (輪舞-revolution)
I have literally just found out the reading of the title was "rondo" and not "rinbu." Anyway, if I only had to pick only one song to describe this year for me, it would probably be this one. I could not get tired of hearing it in every single episode of Shoujo Kakumei Utena. This was a series I had been longing to watch and I finally got to it. It climbed to my favorites list and I ended up rewatching the movie one week after my first watch. Series like Sailor Moon and Mawaru Penguindrum have got me fascinated with the mind of Kunihiko Ikuhara so I really expected I would like it as much as I did. I was excited about the character of Utena but ended up captivated by Anthy's complexity as a character.
I also wondered how I had kept myself from listening to this song for so long. I actually also got more into 90's J-pop in general this year, and Rondo-revolution was right up my alley. The upbeat song and lyrics fit perfectly with the image of the anime series. Song and lyrics were authored by Masami Okui (奥井雅美), now a member of ani-singer supergroup JAM Project, and composed and arranged by her producer Toshiro Yabuki (矢吹俊郎).
Nana Mizuki - ETERNAL BLAZE
None of the videos for the original song would embed so here's Vtuber Subaru Oozora's cover as a placeholder. You can go on YouTube to listen to the original song. Sorry about that!
Another series I had been longing to watch for many years was Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha. It was interesting to see how much the first season was similar to Madoka Magica as they share the same director. However, the second season of Nanoha was the true highlight for me. The story and universe were so well fleshed out that I enjoyed every single episode and had a blast watching the remake/recap movie.
The opening song ETERNAL BLAZE helps to build up that hype by boosting Nana Mizuki (水樹奈々)'s powerful vocals into a song which I believe conveys the feelings of the character she voices in the series, Fate Testarossa. It matches how ardent and at the same time heartwarming her feelings for Nanoha are, as her first and best friend (they are dubbed the "mothers" of yuri doujinshi works... do with that what you want). The song was also a landmark in anisong in general as it was the first single by a voice actress to reach number 2 in the Oricon charts. Mizuki herself wrote the lyrics while the great composition and arrangement are work of Noriyasu Agematsu (上松範康) from the Elements Garden team.
fhána - Ai no Supreme! (愛のシュプリ一ム!)
I actually had not finished a seasonal anime since 2018, the year I spent watching the amazing Hugtto! Precure. This year I decided to give it a shot again, one or two series at a time, and the first was Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon S. I had watched the first season back when it aired and I am a huge Kyoto Animation fan. I was taken back to that day when my favorite animation studio showed up in the news of my country - for the worst possible reason... It was weird and touching seeing some staff credited in Kobayashi's production knowing they had already passed away.
J-Canuck has already touched on this song on his own post so you may already know the new tune by fhána maintained the catchiness of the first opening theme. This time they gave even more attention to the choreography and posted some videos with the Chorogons, the unit composed by the voice actresses of the anime. I have known fhána ever since their debut single which was the ending theme for Uchouten Kazoku and I like their sound very much.
Liella! - Tokonatsu☆Sunshine (常夏☆サンシャイン)
Another series I watched every week was Love Live! Superstar. I have followed the Love Live! franchise for several years, starting from the mobile rhythm game and going through all the anime series. This year I watched the newest spin-offs, Nijigasaki and Superstar. Nijigasaki had a different feel from the other series (in a good way), but Superstar gave me that goofy and character-driven plot that I would expect from a Love Live! series. Within the fictional group Liella!, I fell in love with the Chinese-Japanese character Kéké Tang. As expected, a second season was already announced and I am very excited for it.
This song in particular, Tokonatsu☆Sunshine, was one that particularly caught my attention for its tropical and groovy vibe with plenty of horns. It instantly reminded me of the Mermaid festa series of songs released back in the day by the original Love Live cast. It was composed and arranged by EFFY with lyrics by Junko Miyajima (宮嶋淳子), two artists with plenty of anisong titles, particularly of the idol genre.
I hope you have enjoyed this glimpse into anisong old and new that marked the year of 2021 for me. I have pretty much given up on scoring shows or having a backlog list so I will continue to go with the flow and watch whatever I feel like in the next year, hoping for more great music releases.
Have a bad day at work? Feel kicked down to the curb? Have a frothy cold mug of this song and see how you feel afterwards. "THE HERO! ~Ikareru Kobushi ni Honō wo Tsukero"(The Hero! ~Set Fire to the Furious Fist~) could work even better than a 3000-yen bottle of Yunker vitamin drink.
"THE HERO!" is also the most appropriate opening theme song for the anime "One Punch Man". I've already mentioned about the hit manga and now anime through the article on the very different ending theme by Hiroko Moriguchi（森口博子）, "Hoshi yori Saki ni Mitsukete Ageru"（星より先に見つけてあげる）. That theme may be humorously ironic but "THE HERO!" is definitely as straight-on and powerful as one of Saitama's right crosses. Right from the slow burn of the guitar in the intro right to the throat-shredding scream of JAM Project member Yoshiki Fukuyama（福山芳樹）at the very end, the power song even had me banging my head in front of the screen (not on the screen...that would be bad). Although the hero Saitama may not have the happiest attitude to his destined career, "THE HERO!" sounds like something that some of those corporate cogs would love to wake up to before trundling off to work in the wee hours of the morning.
JAM (Japan Animationsong Makers) Project has been around since 2000 and has had a shifting lineup which now includes veteran anison singer Masami Okui (奥井雅美...wow!). Their description can be had at Wikipedia, but I can mention that "THE HERO!" is their 62nd single released a couple of months ago in October, and apparently peaked at No. 19. Founding member Hironobu Kageyama（影山 ヒロノブ）wrote and composed the song. The other current members are Masaaki Endo and Hiroshi Kitadani（遠藤正明・きただにひろし）.
Although I didn't know the name of the group until "One Punch Man" was introduced to me in the last few months, it's possible that I may have come across their earlier incarnation while I was still living in the Tokyo area. I was just crossing the intersection just by Tower Records in Shibuya when a smaller version of one of those glitzy advertising trucks turned the corner while blaring a hard rock version of the famed theme for "Space Cruiser Yamato"（宇宙戦艦ヤマト）. Well, I figured...if there could be a classical take on "Uchuu Senkan Yamato", why not a headbanging one? Personally, I'm waiting for a jazz version.
P.S. I'm gonna have to cover that "Fist of the North Star" theme pretty soon.
Masami Okui (奥井雅美) is a contemporary singer and friend of Megumi Hayashibara (林原めぐみ). So, as they collaborated some times in the past, I also enjoyed a couple of songs released by her.
Masami Okui, considered a technically better singer if compared to Megumi Hayashibara, worked as a backing vocalist for artists like Yuki Saito (斉藤由貴), Wink and Tomoyo Harada (原田知世) before starting her own career as a recording artist in the anime business.
After debuting in 1993, Okui became one of the main anime song singers of its time, but different from Hayashibara and other friends in the business, Masami Okui was not a voice-actress. In this case, she specialized herself as a singer-songwriter in the anime business.
“Energy”, an album track from Okui’s debut album “Gyuu”, which was released in April 1995, is a typical 90s anime song with its upbeat sound and heavy synths. Well, in reality, "Energy" was not used in any anime series, but the sound was the same. According to generasia, Masami Okui and Toshiro Yabuki (矢吹俊郎), the guy responsible for the arrangement of “Energy” and a good portion of Okui's songs at the time, “are known to be the pioneers in the introduction of dance sound in the anison musics”. I don’t quite agree with this, basically because a bunch of other anime singers, like Megumi Hayashibara, Yoko Takahashi (高橋洋子) and Kasumi Matsumura (松村香澄), to name a few, were doing similar works at the time. Besides that, I can see where they’re coming from with this sentence. Yabuki probably had an eye on the Komuro (小室 哲哉) dance craze of the mid-90s, and that’s why he tried to, somehow, emulate this specific trendy sound in the anime songs niche. It was a good move, and his arrangements were exciting.
The “Gyuu” album reached #47 on the Oricon charts, selling 11,450 copies. While Okui herself was responsible for lyrics and music, the arrangement, like I said earlier, was done by Toshiro Yabuki. A fun fact is that Yabuki has also worked with Wink as a guitarist a couple of years before Okui worked with the lovely duo.
